OpenGov Grants

The OpenGov Grants program ran from January 2013 to December 2014. It is now closed, and Sunlight is not accepting new applications.

We know how challenging fundraising can be. You start an innovative project using technology to make government more open and accessible and halfway through — you run out of money. Or maybe you know someone who is collecting municipal data and wants to make a cool app to help residents understand how local government works, but they don’t have funding.

If you are developing an open source tool and are looking for funds to jumpstart the project, apply now for an OpenGov Grant from the Sunlight Foundation. We are offering one-time grants in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 to help you fulfill your vision of making government more transparent and accountable. Discover how we will take your project to its next stage of development.

Over the past few years, Sunlight has provided seed funding to a number of innovative opengov projects in the United States.

Sunlight’s support allowed us to turn a rough prototype into a one-of-a-kind research tool for journalists, activists and researchers investigating powerful people and institutions. Sunlight funding has also helped us to integrate important money and politics data sets on LittleSis, facilitating analysis of the role that deep-pocketed donors play in our democracy.

When Sunlight funded us in 2010, MuckRock was a bold idea and a few hundred lines of code. The Sunlight Foundation’s support provided not just funding we needed to get off the ground, but validation that helped sell the ideas to others, and it provided that with minimal paperwork and endless encouragement.

TurboVote was nothing more than an idea when Sunlight offered us a mini-grant. Those funds let us build a prototype. That prototype helped us demonstrate a real need for better voter services and build an organization capable of providing them. We wouldn’t be where we are today without Sunlight’s initial, enthusiastic support.